Professor Black condemns the exclusive focus on the Atlantic—or transatlantic—slave trade to the exclusion of the robust slave trade conducted by Arabs across the Sahara Desert. Or, across the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea to markets in the Middle East. This exclusive focus on westerners as slave owners and traders, notes Black, “fits with the [political] narrative of Western exploitation” of underdeveloped countries and their people.

The greatest development economist to live was Lord P.T. Bauer. As The Economist quipped, Bauer was to foreign aid what Friedrich Hayek was to socialism: a slayer. In his Dissent on Development (London, 1971), Bauer bolstered Black’s point well before the latter made it: “The slave trade between Africa and the Middle East antedated the Atlantic slave trade by centuries, and far outlasted it. Tens of millions of Africans were carried away—north through the Sahara, and from East Africa, by Arab and Muslim slave traders, well before Europeans took up the trade from West Africa.”

Arab affinity for slavery, ethnic prejudice and purges lives on today in the treatment, for example, of blacks in Darfur and Yazidi Kurds in Iraq.

Considering Europeans were not alone in the slave trade, Black, in particular, questions “the commonplace identification of slavery with racism,” given that, like serfdom, slavery was a device (albeit an inefficient one) “to ensure labor availability and control.”

At its most savage, child slavery still thrives in Haiti in the form of the “Restavec system.”

(noget om den ikke vestlige verdens primitivitet)

The cult of apology that has gripped America and Britain is uniquely Western. What other people would agonize over events they had no part in, personally, for damages they did not inflict?

Grievance is leveled at a collective, all whites, for infractions it did not commit: Africans who were not enslaved are seen as having an ineffable claim against Europeans who did not enslave them.

At its core, the argument against racism, at least as it works to further black interests, is an argument against collectivism. You’re meant to avoid judging an entire people based on the color of their epidermis or the conduct of a statistically significant number of them.

It is, however, deemed perfectly acceptable to malign and milk Europeans for all they’re worth, based on the lack of pigment in their skin and their overall better socio-economic performance.

Now, after a roller coaster of emotions and barrage of media tantrums, it seems the issue is settled, sort of. In a recent paper in the journal Science, a team of researchers actually acknowledges the pause and attempts to explain it.

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“The Pause in Global Warming is Finally Explained,” Scientific Americanassures us; “The global warming slowdown is real—but that’s no reason to question climate science,” sneers the Washington Post; “Scientists now know why global warming has slowed down and it’s not good news for us,” proclaims a recent headline on Quartz.com.

As is often the case with predicting the climate, however, the certainty proclaimed in the headlines is anything but certain. This isn’t the first time researchers have attempted to explain what they have previously denied. To date, there are more than 52 scientific theories attempting to solve the pause that doesn’t exist, from a lazy sun to trade winds to the wrong types of El Niño’s. But for some reason Mann’s explanation is the one; 53 is apparently the magic number.

(…)

Mann’s paper encapsulates perfectly the issue between skeptics of climate change and the hard-core believers: something in the models is always missing that is later found. What was wrong last time has been corrected, even though last time nothing was wrong. The same models that are considered gospel always come up short, only to be revised as gospel yet again.

Everyone understands that climate change research is tricky; countless variables constantly interacting with one another at ever-changing time and distance scales. And studying the Earth’s climate is indeed a worthwhile pursuit. But there is nothing scientific about denying actual, physical data, in this case the global average temperature over two decades. And nothing is academic or open-minded about demonizing an entire portion of the population pointing out the obvious by labeling them “deniers” as if they doubt the Holocaust.

(…)

Don’t expect full acceptance anytime soon, however. In fact, a recent Nature paper defends the accuracy of the very models that failed to predict the very pause that didn’t exist that now does exist but only because the models were wrong. No, this is not a Zen koan: it’s modern climate science.

Lockheed Martin, a recent Washington Post article notes, is getting into renewable energy, nuclear fusion, “sustainability” and even fish farming projects, to augment its reduced defense profits. The company plans to forge new ties with Defense Department and other Obama initiatives, based on a shared belief in manmade climate change as a critical security and planetary threat. It is charging ahead where other defense contractors have failed, confident that its expertise, lobbying skills and “socially responsible” commitment to preventing climate chaos will land it plentiful contracts and subsidies.

As with its polar counterparts, 90% of the titanic climate funding iceberg is invisible to most citizens, businessmen and politicians. The Lockheed action is the mere tip of the icy mountaintop.

The multi-billion-dollar agenda reflects the Obama Administration’s commitment to using climate change to radically transform America. It reflects a determination to make the climate crisis industry so enormous that no one will be able to tear it down, even as computer models and disaster claims become less and less credible – and even if Republicans control Congress and the White House after 2016. Lockheed is merely the latest in a long list of regulators, researchers, universities, businesses, manufacturers, pressure groups, journalists and politicians with such strong monetary, reputational and authority interests in alarmism that they will defend its tenets and largesse tooth and nail.

Above all, it reflects a conviction that alarmists have a right to control our energy use, lives, livelihoods and living standards, with no transparency and no accountability for mistakes they make or damage they inflict on disfavored industries and families.

His latest study, published in Thermal Science, delivers this week’s second whammy. It continues the analysis he has long pursued, which consistently arrives at the same conclusion: Earth is now entering a new Little Ice Age, Earth’s 19th Little Ice Age, to be precise. Abdussamatov has been quite confident of his findings for what might strike some as odd reasons: His science is based on that of the giants in the field — astronomers like Milutin Milankovitch, who a century ago described how tilts in its axis and other changes in the Earth’s movements determine its climate, and William Herschel, who two centuries ago noticed an inverse correlation between wheat prices on Earth and the number of sunspots generated by the Sun’s cycles. (Hint: the more energy from the Sun that Earth gets, the more warmth Earth receives, the more abundant the wheat crops, the lower the price of wheat; the less energy from the Sun, the less warmth, the more wheat crop failures, the higher the wheat price.)

Greenhouse gases — CO2 and water vapour — play a role in this drama but the gases come not from SUVs and other man-made activities but from the oceans, which contain 50 times as much CO2 as the atmosphere. As the oceans warm or cool because of the Sun, they release or absorb these gases, whose greenhouse effect is secondary and relatively minor.

Abdussamatov’s model incorporates the Sun’s 200-year cycles and the feedback effects from greenhouse gases released by the oceans, and sees how they acted on Earth’s previous 18 Little Ice Ages. “All 18 periods of significant climate changes found during the last 7,500 years were entirely caused by corresponding quasi-bicentennial variations of [total solar irradiance] together with the subsequent feedback effects, which always control and totally determine cyclic mechanism of climatic changes from global warming to Little Ice Age.”

If the 19th Little Ice Age follows the pattern of the previous 18, Earth slipped into an ice age in the winter just concluded and will become progressively colder over the next 50 years, reaching its depth around 2060. Another half century, taking us to the 22nd century, and we’ll arrive back at today’s temperatures.

We may be witnessing the start of the long-awaited jump in global temperatures. There is “a vast and growing body of research,” as Climate Central explained in February. “Humanity is about to experience a historically unprecedented spike in temperatures.”

A March study, “Near-term acceleration in the rate of temperature change,” makes clear that an actual acceleration in the rate of global warming is imminent — with Arctic warming rising a stunning 1°F per decade by the 2020s.

Scientists note that some 90 percent of global heating goes into the oceans — and ocean warming has accelerated in recent years. Leading climatologist Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research explained here in 2013 that “a global temperature increase occurs in the latter stages of an El Niño event, as heat comes out of the ocean and warms the atmosphere.”

In March, NOAA announced the arrival of an El Niño, a multi-month weather pattern “characterized by unusually warm ocean temperatures in the Equatorial Pacific.”

How much of a temperature jump should we expect? Last month, Trenberth explained to Living on Earth:

I interviewed Trenberth this week, and he told me that he thinks “a jump is imminent.” When I asked whether he considers that “likely,” he answered, “I am going to say yes. Somewhat cautiously because this is sticking my neck out.”

Trenberth explained that it’s significant the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) “seems to have gone strongly positive” because that is “perhaps the best single indicator to me that a jump is imminent.” During a PDO, he explains, “the distribution of heat in the oceans changes along with some ocean currents.”

The most popular electric car, a Nissan Leaf, over a 90,000-mile lifetime will emit 31 metric tons of CO2, based on emissions from its production, its electricity consumption at average U.S. fuel mix and its ultimate scrapping. A comparable diesel Mercedes CDI A160 over a similar lifetime will emit 3 tons more across its production, diesel consumption and ultimate scrapping.

The other main benefit from electric cars was supposed to be lower air pollution. Yes, it might be powered by coal, but unlike the regular car, coal emissions are far away from the city centers where more people live and where damage from air pollution hits hardest.

Of course, electric car proponents would venture that the perceived rapid ramp-up of renewables will make future electric cars much cleaner. This, however, is mostly wishful thinking. Today, the U.S. gets 14% of its electric power from renewables. In 25 years, Obama’s Energy Information Administration estimates this will have gone up just 3 percentage points to 17%.

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Proponents could also argue that the more mileage an electric car logs, the more its carbon footprint is reduced because the battery production is a significant part of their total emissions.

Yet, it hardly matters. The added mileage saves little in the way of emissions, and the electric car’s extended use might mean it would have to replace its batteries, entirely blowing the climate benefit.

Compare this to the fact that all the wind turbines and solar panels in the world reduce CO? emissions, at a maximum, by 275 Mt. In other words, the US shale gas revolution has by itself reduced global emissions more than all the well-intentioned solar and wind in the world.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), Europe gets just 1.3 percent of its energy from renewables like solar and wind, whereas it gets about 75 percent from fossil fuels and most of the remainder from nuclear. Even an extremely optimistic scenario from the IEA suggests that by 2035, Europe will only be able to generate 8 percent of its energy from these renewables. Focusing on them is simply populism without realism.

Moreover, subsidizing ever more green energy is becoming unaffordable. Spain is already paying more in subsidies to wind and solar than they spend on their higher education, making a dramatic increase exceedingly unlikely. But perhaps the best illustration comes from Germany, the EU’s largest economy with the biggest focus on renewables.

Last year alone, German consumers subsidized renewable energies to the tune of $27 billion, contributing to an inflation-adjusted 80 percent rise in household electricity prices since 2000. Yet the intermittency of renewables has increased the country’s reliance on fossil fuels since the nuclear phase-out of 2011. As Spiegel pointed out: “Consumer advocates and aid organizations say the breaking point has already been reached. Today, more than 300,000 households a year are seeing their power shut off because of unpaid bills.” Economic models for Europe show that the current climate policies will cost an excruciating $280 billion annually.